About Me

Thursday, June 5, 2008

The kids are fine

Despite nearly every measure about how young people are doing being significantly better than their parents generation, people love to talk about how bad young people are in America are. I therefore will pass on a quote I ran into in an article today pointing out how much worse the teenagers of the 70s, and 80s were than todays.

"The proportion of teenagers reporting having sexual intercourse rose steadily through the 1970s and 1980s, fueling a sharp rise in teen pregnancy. The trend reversed around 1991 because of AIDS, changing mores about sex and other factors. At the same time, more sexually active teens started using condoms and other contraceptive measures. Together, the trends have pushed the U.S. teen pregnancy rate to historic lows."

There is some signs of this trend reversing but that doesn't change the basic point. Anything from IQ, to College Graduation rates, to teen pregnancy or murder rates todays youth run circles around their parents.